It was 40 years ago today

[qtlaw]

No '80s teen flick had an ending within a thousand miles of Last American Virgin.

THAT was the most brutal ending EVER!! If ever there was a lesson that the "hanging around" method was not going to get you the girl (i.e. pining from the side) nothing would (of course I didn't learn until later.)

 

[YMCA B-Baller]

Life can go from the Plimsouls to James Ingram in a heartbeat.

Haven't seen it in ages, but my recollection is that "Last American Virgin" was more honest than some of its peers.

Also, part of the early 80s abortion teen movie wave! To this day, I associate "Open Arms" with abortion. Why?

Because I'm an idiot as I became convinced that was the song in "Last American Virgin" Diane Franklin had an abortion to, even though I think it was actually "Oh No" by the Commodores ... if there was even any music in the scene at all.

 

[YMCA B-Baller]

Also, I mean, I'd hang around for Diane Franklin.

 

[garrow]

Lane Meyer certainly did

 

[Junkie]

(And I don't want to be the guy who drops in to **** on a beloved movie ...)

We do what comes most naturally to us.

 

[Junkie]

If ever there were a movie that calls for suspending disbelief, it's "The Breakfast Club." I mean, they ****ing fired up fatties in the library, which probably would not have gone unnoticed, no matter where Vernon and Carl (the best character in that show, by the way) were at the time. They had a wrestler, in season, pounding a 3500-calorie lunch. In reality, he'd have had that apple and a glass of water. ... Bender probably caused $10,000 (ca. 1984 money) crashing through the ceiling ... Claire kissed a hood in front of her rich dad ... Andrew kissed a goth chick in front of his jugghead dad ... nothing like any of that ever happened. Questioning the realism of this is completely pointless. We don't do it with Forest Gump, which is the least believable movie of all time, so why do it with "The Breakfast Club" or ...

"16 Candles." Everything about the movie -- every single second -- is an ongoing caricature. Of everything. People want to go all Zapruder on it and break it down frame-by-frame. It's a stupid teen comedy. It's not meant to be taken seriously. Never was back then and shouldn't be now. And "16 Candles," which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in about six weeks, is still funny as hell now, maybe even more so because of all the exaggeration that went on. Not one thing in that movie was believable, nor was it intended to be.

And yet all of it was more believable than "St. Elmo's Fire," when Kevin gets a front-page editorial in the WaPo as his first "byline" after doing obits for the first few weeks of his career.

Great stuff. All of it.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

It was interesting seeing the "brat pack" grow up from the early 80s high school to the late 80s young adulthood. That's the only observation I have.

Pretty much the ass end of the Boomer generation, when you think about it. The last of the Boomers turned 18 in 1982 and these teen movies were their dying teen spasms.

 

[BTExpress]

No '80s teen flick had an ending within a thousand miles of Last American Virgin.

Great pull.

I mean, NO teen movie back then had an ending where the poor, downtrodden star didn't wind up on top of the world. And then this! No ultimate revenge, no finding the even prettier girl at the party, just . . . heartbreak (to a great ending song).

 

[X-Hack]

I was in the Class of '76, so "Dazed and Confused" was the movie that encapsulated my high school experience.

Although to be accurate, the main characters in D&C were not Class of '76 -- they were '77s, the rising seniors who took over the social apparatus as the current graduating class (MY class) went out the door.

D&C was dead-on balls accurate in depicting the culture of cruising around to hastily-thrown together keggers in farm fields, going to weird hybrid nightclubs which were sone combinations of Chuck E. Cheeses and biker pool halls/ beer bars, in the magical 6-8 years between the lowering of the drinking age to 18 in most states nationwide.

Lowering the drinking age ensured about half of high school seniors (and some juniors) would be legally able to obtain alcohol, untik the slamming of the doors with the federally dictated rise of the cutoff back to 21 by the end of the decade.

While D&C got all the atmospherics right, they didn't get the pecking order politics or the transfer of social supremacy right, at least not as it usually happened in Starrville in my days in the 1970s.

In Starrville, a B1G college town, a fairly large percentage of the graduating classes (about 25% i believe) every year from Starrville High stayed home and went to Starrville State, while another 10% maybe went to Starrville Metro Community College, making a solid 1/3 of the graduating cksss that was going to college in town, then add on the people who launched into the job market and stayed home and got jobs in the area, they were still around as well.

Bottom line, when our classes graduated, we didn't all pack up, dissipate and disappear -- the outgoing graduating class for the most part hung around and dominated the summertime kegger and bar hopping scene (as the seniors the year before had done as well).

It wasn't really until August when the people who WERE going out of town to go to college basically started packing up, pretty much everybody would go Up North or some vacation paradise for a week or two, and then later August when preseason practice in most sports kicked off, that the true passing of the party torch to the succeeding senior class took place.

When the dorms and student apartments at Starrville State started filling up, as well as the then-flourishing college town bars, most of us townies started to junp into the college party circuit, and finally started leaving the high school keggers behind.

But even that wasn't really a clean break either-- if you were still in the phone loop for kegger hotlines, you could still show up, especially to chase girls in the class behind you.

But once college classes opened and B1G college football games kicked off, if you were a college kid hanging out at high school keggers, you had the moderately awkward feeling of being unofficial chaperones.

Was "Starrville" green and white or maize and blue (though I'm open to the possibility that it's Columbus, Bloomington or Champagne)? Because I went to HS in one possible Starrville and college in the other (a decade later, but I do remember the mid/late 70s vibe and it's your description is accurate)

 

[X-Hack]

THAT was the most brutal ending EVER!! If ever there was a lesson that the "hanging around" method was not going to get you the girl (i.e. pining from the side) nothing would (of course I didn't learn until later.)

Oof. Hard to watch even 40-something years later. That "alpha" and "beta" dynamic is also fairly common. Similar vibe in Swingers (Mikey and Trent) and Sideways (Miles and whatever Thomas Haden Church's character's name was -- I don't remember, and I read the book too). Except those films didn't have the gut punch ending -- their character moved on to something better.

 

[John]

It was interesting seeing the "brat pack" grow up from the early 80s high school to the late 80s young adulthood. That's the only observation I have.

Pretty much the ass end of the Boomer generation, when you think about it. The last of the Boomers turned 18 in 1982 and these teen movies were their dying teen spasms.

I saw where Andrew McCarthy gave a reading in Square Books in Oxford, Miss., the other day. He's become a pretty accomplished writer/author. I suspect most of the crowd there saw Pretty In Pink in the theater.

 

[DanOregon]

Alternate endings to Hughes movies - Samantha realizes boys are dumb and begins same sex relationship with her best friend. The geek is charged with date-rape.
Breakfast Club: Bender pulls a gun and kills them all. Or really, any of the five. Or we have that cathartic moment at the end and it happens on the following Monday by some random student.
Ferris Beueller: Cameron kills himself. (I mean really, it was the logical next step).